Jonathan Weiss presented on Ruby on Rails security. He discussed potential vulnerabilities in Rails application setup and deployment, application code, and the Rails framework. He highlighted information leaks, SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), session fixation, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), mass assignment, and denial of service attacks as specific security risks and provided best practices for mitigating each one.

1. Ruby on Rails Security
Jonathan Weiss, 30.12.2007
Peritor Wissensmanagement GmbH

2. Who am I ?
Jonathan Weiss
• Consultant for Peritor Wissensmanagement GmbH
• Specialized in Rails, Scaling, and Code Review
• Active member of the Rails community
• MeinProf.de - one of the first big German Rails sites
• Webistrano - Rails deployment tool
• FreeBSD Rubygems and Ruby on Rails maintainer
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3. Agenda
Follow the application stack
and look for
Setup and deployment
• Information leaks
Application code
• Possible vulnerabilities
• Best practices
Framework code
Rails Application Stack
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4. Rails Application Setup
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5. Rails Setup
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6. Rails Setup - FastCGI
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7. Rails Setup - Mongrel
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8. Information leaks
and
possible vulnerabilities
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9. Information leaks
Is the target application a Rails application?
• Default setup for static files:
/javascripts/application.js
/stylesheets/application.css
/images/foo.png
• Pretty URLs
/project/show/12
/message/create
/folder/delete/43
/users/83
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10. Information leaks
Is the target application a Rails application?
• Rails provides default templates for 404 and 500 status pages
• Different Rails versions use different default pages
• 422.html only present in applications generated with Rails 2.0
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11. Sample Status Pages
http://www.twitter.com/500.html http://www.43people.com/500.html
http://www.strongspace.com/500.html Rails >= 1.2 status 500 page
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12. Server Header
GET http://www.43people.com
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 21:23:24 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_deflate/1.0.21 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7e-p1
Cache-Control: no-cache
…
GET https://signup.37signals.com/highrise/solo/signup/new
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 21:23:24 GMT
Server: Mongrel 1.1.1Status: 200 OK
…
Disable Server header
# httpd.conf
Header unset Server
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13. Information leaks
Subversion metadata
• Typically Rails applications are deployed with Capistrano / Webistrano
• This will push .svn directories to the servers
GET http://www.strongspace.com/.svn/entries
…
dir
25376
http://svn.joyent.com/joyent/deprecated_repositories/www.strongspace/trunk/public
http://svn.joyent.com/joyent
Prevent .svn download
2006-04-14T03:06:39.902218Z <DirectoryMatch "^/.*/.svn/">
34 ErrorDocument 403 /404.html
justin@joyent.com Order allow,deny
… Deny from all
Satisfy All
</DirectoryMatch>
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14. Cookie Session Storage
Since Rails 2.0 by default the session data is stored in the cookie
Base64(CGI::escape(SESSION-DATA))--HMAC(secret_key, SESSION-DATA)
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15. Cookie Session Storage
Security implications
• The user can view the session data in plain text
• The HMAC can be brute-forced and arbitrary session data could be created
• Replay attacks are easier as you cannot flush the client-side session
Countermeasures
• Don’t store important data in the session!
• Use a strong password,
Rails already forces at least 30 characters
• Invalidate sessions after certain time on the server side
… or just switch to another session storage
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16. Cookie Session Storage
Rails default session secret
Set HTTPS only cookies
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17. Cross-Site Scripting - XSS
“The injection of HTML or client-side Scripts (e.g. JavaScript) by malicious users into
web pages viewed by other users.”
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18. Cross-Site Scripting - XSS
Cases of accepted user input
• No formatting allowed
search query, user name, post title, …
• Formatting allowed
post body, wiki page, …
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19. XSS - No Formatting Allowed
Use the Rails `h()` helper to HTML escape user input
But using `h()` everywhere is easy to forget
• Use safeERB plugin
• safeERB will raise an exception whenever a tainted string is not escaped
• Explicitly untaint string in order to not escape it
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/safe_erb
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20. XSS - Formatting Allowed
Two approaches
Use custom tags that will translate to HTML (vBulletin tags, RedCloth, Textile, …)
Use HTML and remove unwanted tags and attributes
• Blacklist - Rails 1.2
• Whitelist - Rails 2.0
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21. XSS - Custom Tags
Relying on the external syntax is not really secure
Filter HTML anyhow
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22. XSS - HTML Filtering
Use the Rails `sanitize()` helper
Only effective with Rails 2.0:
• Filters HTML nodes and attributes
• Removes protocols like “javascript:”
• Handles unicode/ascii/hex hacks
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23. XSS - HTML Filtering
sanitize(html, options = {})
http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionView/Helpers/SanitizeHelper.html
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24. XSS - HTML Filtering
Utilize Tidy if you want to be more cautious
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25. Session Fixation
Provide the user with a session that he shares with the attacker:
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26. Session Fixation
Rails uses only cookie-based sessions
Still, you should reset the session after a login
The popular authentication plugins like restful_authentication are not doing this!
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27. Cross-Site Request Forgery - CSRF
You visit a malicious site which has an image like this
Only accepting POST does not really help
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28. CSRF Protection in Rails
By default Rails 2.0 will check all POST requests for a session token
All forms generated by Rails will supply this token
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29. CSRF Protection in Rails
Very useful and on-by-default, but make sure that
• GET requests are safe and idempotent
• Session cookies are not persistent (expires-at)
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30. SQL Injection
The users input is not correctly escaped before using it in SQL statements
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31. SQL Injection Protection in Rails
Always use the escaped form
If you have to manually use a user-submitted value, use `quote()`
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32. JavaScript Hijacking
http://my.evil.site/
JSON response
The JSON response will be evaled by the Browser’s JavaScript engine.
With a redefined `Array()` function this data can be sent back to http://my.evil.site
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33. JavaScript Hijacking Prevention
• Don’t put important data in JSON responses
• Use unguessable URLs
• Use a Browser that does not support the redefinition of Array & co,
currently only FireFox 3.0
• Don’t return a straight JSON response, prefix it with garbage:
The Rails JavaScript helpers don’t support prefixed JSON responses
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34. Mass Assignment
User model
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35. Mass Assignment
Handling in Controller
A malicious user could just submit any value he wants
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36. Mass Assignment
Use `attr_protected` and `attr_accessible`
Vs.
Start with `attr_protected` and migrate to `attr_accessible` because of the different
default policies for new attributes.
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37. Rails Plugins
Re-using code through plugins is very popular in Rails
Plugins can have their problems too
• Just because somebody wrote and published a plugin it doesn’t mean the plugin is
proven to be mature, stable or secure
• Popular plugins can also have security problems, e.g. restful_authentication
• Don’t use svn:externals to track external plugins,
if the plugin’s home page is unavailable you cannot deploy your site
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38. Rails Plugins
How to handle plugins
• Always do a code review of new plugins and look for obvious problems
• Track plugin announcements
• Track external sources with Piston, a wrapper around svn:externals
http://piston.rubyforge.org/
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39. Rails Denial of Service Attacks
Rails is single-threaded and a typical setup concludes:
• Limited number of Rails instances
• ~8 per CPU
• Even quite active sites (~500.000 PI/day ) use 10-20 CPUs
• All traffic is handled by Rails
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40. Rails Denial of Service Attacks
A denial of service attack is very easy if Rails is handling down/uploads.
Just start X (= Rails instances count) simultaneous down/uploads over a throttled line.
This is valid for all slow requests, e.g.
• Image processing
• Report generation
• Mass mailing
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41. Rails Slow Request DoS Prevention
Serve static files directly through the web server
• Apache, Lighttpd, nginx (use x-sendfile for private files)
• Amazon S3
Contaminate slow requests
• Define several clusters for several tasks
• Redirect depending on URL
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42. Conclusion
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43. Conclusion
Rails has many security features enabled by default
• SQL quoting
• HTML sanitization
• CSRF protection
The setup can be tricky to get right
Rails is by no means a “web app security silver bullet” but adding security
is easy and not a pain like in many other frameworks
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44. Peritor Wissensmanagement GmbH
Lenbachstraße 2
12157 Berlin
Telefon: +49 (0)30 69 40 11 94
Telefax: +49 (0)30 69 40 11 95
Internet: www.peritor.com
E-Mail: kontakt@peritor.com
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